Elements

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

Elements by Amy Crook, detail

After many months of working in the printmaking studio, I amassed quite a collection of little printing plates with abstract and symbolic images on them. I made a number of monoprints using them, including this one. It’s got elements of etching, monoprint, and chine collé in it, and always felt to me a bit myterious, as though it was trying to show me something I could never quite make out.

The grey panel at the top uses the oil-based printer’s ink on one of the blank monoprint plates to render a smoky, abstract image. The middle is a piece of paper from one of the Chinese New Year packets, imprinted with an etching plate that took most of the foil away with it. The final image is a tiny etching plate, a mere one inch square, echoing the smokiness of the top image, or perhaps originating it.

I think I still have a bunch of these plates, and I miss being able to pull them out and muck about late into the night, handling the thick, wet paper and exploring all the different ways the images I’d created could become something new.

Elements by Amy Crook

This is the full page, including the inevitable inky fingerprints and smudges around the edge. I always was a messy printmaker.

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One Response to “Elements”

[…] one of my etching plates, the same one that shows up in very different contexts in Ogdred Weary and Elements. Instead of inking into the deep grooves of the plate, I used the same brayer (ink roller) that I […]

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